"No!" he exclaimed wildly, as the tempest seemed to increase, and the ship was thrown further on shoal: "she shall not escape me thus, after all I have done and dared in order to possess her! Our funeral may take place to-night--but our bridal shall be first. Ha! ha!"--and he laughed with a kind of despairing mockery, while the fragments of the vessel's sails flapped against the spars with a din as if some mighty demon were struggling with the blast. The sense of appalling danger seemed to madden Stephano only because it threatened to separate him from Nisida; and, fearfully excited, he rushed toward her, crying wildly, "You shall be mine!" But how terrible was the yell which burst from his lips, when by the glare of a brilliant flash of lightning, he beheld Nisida cast herself over the side of the vessel! For a single instant he fell back appalled, horror-struck; but at the next, he plunged with insensate fury after her. And the rage of the storm redoubled. When the misty shades of morning cleared away, and the storm had passed, Nisida was seated alone upon the strand, having miraculously escaped that eternal night of death which leads to no dawn. But where was Stephano Verrina? She knew not; although she naturally conjectured, and even hoped, that he was numbered with the dead. CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE ISLAND IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA. Fair and beauteous was the Mediterranean isle whereon the Lady Nisida had been thrown. When the morning mists had dispersed, and the sunbeams tinged the ridges of the hills and the summits of the tallest trees, Nisida awoke as it were from the profound lethargic reverie in which she had been plunged for upward of an hour, since the moment when the billows had borne her safely to the shore. The temperature of that island was warm and genial, for there eternal summer reigned, and thus, though her garments were still dripping wet, Nisida experienced no cold. She rose from the bank of sand whereon she had been seated, and cast anxious, rapid, and searching glances around her. Not a human being met her eyes; but in the woods that stretched, with emerald pride, almost down to the golden sands, the birds and insects--nature's free commoners--sent forth the sounds of life and welcomed the advent of the morn with that music of the groves.